


Goldenrod

by Ferritin4



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Wartime Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 10:51:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9178423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferritin4/pseuds/Ferritin4
Summary: “You’ve gotta be crazy to fly one of those things,” Dima says, looking up at the icy arcing contrails of the Swedish jets as they rocket overhead.You have to be crazy to fly, Sasha thinks, and you have to be good.





	

* * *

 

 

A hundred men meet, and there is a decision. Fifty men meet, and there is fear, and the pulse of a nation after tragedy, throbbing under the fingers of those people who cannot let the proletariat get out of their grasp.

Ten men meet, and there is war.

 

* * *

  

“You’ve gotta be crazy to fly one of those things,” Dima says, looking up at the icy arcing contrails of the Swedish jets as they rocket overhead.

“You gotta be crazy both ways,” Sasha tells him from his perch, half out the window. This war is modern: this war is fought man-to-tank, hulking clumsy German armored cars and jazzy Russian lightweight trucks facing off against even madder guerrillas, single people with RPGs. There isn’t a sane one among them, out here in the dark brown hills of this godforsaken land.

Sasha is crazy too, because he kind of loves it.

 

* * *

 

You have to be crazy to fly, Sasha thinks, and you have to be good.

Air support always wins; he knew that before they hit the dirt roads in jackboots and jacked-up second-hand trucks. Air power is _power_ , death on call, raining down like black ash from the mountains.

Dima is driving, so Sasha calls in the coordinates more often than not. He doesn’t know how many of them there are up there, crazy-ass flyboys with the most expensive toys in the world, but God if he isn’t thankful for them all, every lunatic one.

Sasha comes onto the radio once, in the middle of the night, after watching the waiting hills blossom with fire in the distance.

He feels safer the closer the bombs fall, because he is insane like the rest of them.

“This is Dar Alpha Two,” he says into the crackling stillness. “Come in, flyboy. You there?”

“Dar Alpha, this is Selti 16,” someone says, nearly breathless. “Go ahead, if you like.”

“Thank you, madman,” Sasha tells him.

The voice on the radio chuckles, soft in the warm darkness, not much louder than the wild bugs in the grass.

“Always happy to be of assistance,” it says.

 

* * *

 

 Sasha gets the same madman a few more times, Selti 16. He has a catch to his voice that stops barely short of halting; his English is just good enough that he sounds thoughtful instead of stuck, a trick which Sasha has yet to learn.

“Ah,” the voice says to him, “I’m happy to help,” and the warm tone of his words make him sounds like he means it.

 

* * *

 

Sasha and Dima make it out of the hills by the skin of their teeth.

No, no: they make it of the hills because Sasha makes a suicide run from their bombed-out truck for the guerrillas’ equally fucked-up vehicle, which appears to have a functional radio.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Dima yells, and Sasha waves him off and starts on the impossible task of figuring out what fucking channel his boys might be on.

Dima isn’t yelling at him anymore, which Sasha is going to take as a good sign. 

It’s mostly static. Sometimes it’s a language Sasha doesn’t know. Suddenly, it’s quiet, a blank channel wide open like a window on a sunny day.

It could be anyone, but Sasha could really use anyone at this point.

“This is Dar Alpha Two,” he tells no one. “This is Dar Alpha Two,” he repeats. “Anybody fucking there?”

Nobody is there. He tries another channel.

 

* * *

 

Swedish is a terrible language, not nearly as beautiful as the lovely song of Russian, but oh holy God it sounds like rain from Heaven right now.

“This is Dar Alpha Two,” Sasha interrupts, giddy. Dima had better be fucking alive for this. Sasha has no idea how long he’s been working on this godforsaken radio.

“Dar Alpha?” his flyboy says, surprised. “Ah — this is Selti —”

“I know who is,” Sasha cuts him off. “I got work for you,” he says, “and better be good work, too, crazy,” he tells him, and starts giving him numbers.

It’s so quiet on the other that Sasha is worried he’s lost him, but he makes another stifled, bright noise when Sasha finishes with, “and try not blow me up, we about two, three klicks away. South.”

“Dar Alpha,” Selti 16 says warily, “you know there’s good chance I blow you up, ja?”

“Da,” Sasha answers, “but you maybe _try_ not to.”

“Happy to try,” Selti 16 replies.

 

* * *

 

Sasha has never seen one of the Swedish jets from this close up. He’s seen the Russian fighters on the ground, when they were back in Moscow doing training drills, but those things haven’t got the navigation systems God gave a sewer rat, and the Swedes are the ones on the front lines, and —

Selti 16 rips up the air so close to the ground Sasha thinks he’s going to clip the fucking scrub trees. Sasha’s deaf as a post, and then, abruptly, he’s also blind: there is no noise anywhere but the unholy scream of fossil fuel turning to raw forward power; there is no light but the blistering flash of destruction, two klicks to the north, just near enough to lift the car Sasha’s hiding behind a foot off the ground. Just far enough to let it land where it took off, without crushing him.

 

* * *

 

Like he said, they make it out of the hills by the skin of their teeth.

 

* * *

 

The base in Germany is like a palace after that shithole. There are showers, and there’s food with fresh plants in it, and Sasha’s even just about got his hearing back when he and Dima hit the mess to find one of the tables occupied with a coven of blue-suited pilots with the crowns, the Tre Kronor, on their shoulders, their helmets at their elbows.

“Hey! Flyboys!” Sasha calls from the mess line. One of them looks up at him, a brunette, and then another face follows. Someone turns in his chair and smiles.

“Ja, ryss?” he says. It’s not Selti 16, but he still looks friendly. They start to stack their plates and collect their things, tucking their helmets under their arms. There are five of them, five insane pairs of gleaming eyes. Five lunatic white smiles, though one of them is holding back as he drops his tray in the tub next to Sasha. His helmet is in his left hand as he tucks a lock of his hair behind his ear; he looks like a goldenrod in bloom.

“You just like to make noise, ryss?” the first one says from Sasha’s other side. He’s still smiling when Sasha turns, not sour, just playing.

“I just want to say thank you,” Sasha says innocently. Behind him, Goldenrod makes a noise of soft surprise, like rustling paper. Sasha twists around a little too slowly.

“You know we always happy to help,” Goldenrod — Selti 16 tells him dryly, connecting his elbow with Sasha’s back as he goes by, and then they’re out the door, cocky sons of bitches, every crazy one.

 

* * *

 

Sasha misses them around the base for a little over a week. The Swedes aren’t on the same schedule as him and Dima, and they may not even eat in the main mess half the time. Sasha knows they’re still working, harder than anyone else. He hears the sirens go when the planes are gearing up; he hears them take off.

He hears the sirens go when he’s the in yard alone ten days after their first hellos, working on the new truck. Sasha's only five feet from the tarmac, and he looks up in time to see Goldenrod swing a leg over into his cockpit, sunshine hair flashing like a beacon. 

Goldenrod drops his helmet onto his hip, halfway in the seat, and lifts both hands to push his hair back off his face. He glances around before he picks up his helmet again, and it looks like habit: it looks like he’s surprised to see Sasha, draped over the door of the truck thirty-five feet away, gritty and grinning.

 _Crazy, crazy,_ Sasha thinks fondly. Goldenrod’s cheek quirks, and Sasha is _almost_ sure one green eye flickers in a wink before he pulls the helmet over his curls and drops into the cockpit. 

 

* * *

 

Sasha and Dima get their new mission after three weeks on base. It seems like an eternity, if a short one. He’s ready to go, if he’s ever going to be. The truck’s ready, sort of.

They get one full day off before they go, some kind of a gift. Sasha uses it to finish fixing the fuel hoses on the truck and to stalk the mess until the Swedes show up.

“Hello, flyboys,” he says, planting himself at their table. One of them jumps; three of them look up at him and nod.

Goldenrod is still eating, eyes on his food. His lips curl around his fork, and Sasha kicks him warmly in the leg in greeting.

It sets off a round of laughter and Swedish-English chatter like birdsong. Sasha is given to understand that Goldenrod’s manners are always shit with new people, and that this is only typical.

“Yes, hello,” Goldenrod says, haughty as a queen and about as stuffy. His dark blue sleeves are wrinkled at the elbows. His scratched-up white helmet is on the table next to him, like a talisman, like a friend.

Sasha wants to touch it, to pat it on the head and say _thanks_.

“We going back out again tomorrow,” Sasha says instead. “You better pick up when I call,” he tells them, all of them, because he doesn’t care which one it is, only that someone knows he’s out there.

Goldenrod raises one of his sunbeam eyebrows, and then his mouth betrays him with a smile.

“Any channel you like, any time,” he says graciously.

“You always there when I need, crazy?” Sasha asks him.

It’s a joke: it’s a joke. It’s a silly thing to say, and Sasha is not the kind of man to make everything into a pronouncement, even the day before going out on a mission. He’s not one to weight his words with meaning.

It hangs heavy in the air between them anyway. Goldenrod regards it with a thoughtful face, and then he shrugs and says, “Ja,” like the tension was never there at all.

 

* * *

 

The hills haven’t gotten any prettier. Dima nearly dies their second day out when he runs the truck over a landmine. They spend fourteen days in the driving rain eating cold MREs and shivering despite the warmth of the earth under them.

They get where they’re going a week late and almost out of food; they get more than what they expected. They get trapped behind a fucking grain silo, and Sasha’s so hungry he’d start eating the goddamned wheat if he had a second to think.

 

* * *

 

Sasha doesn’t know the word for _goldenrod_ in English. Selti 16 evidently doesn’t know his plants in Russian, so he doesn’t make any special new noises when Sasha mutters, “Spasibo, zolotarnik,” out of air and out of lightness, finally out of the endless rain in an abandoned grain silo surrounded by newly-flattened hills.

He’s just thankful, so fucking thankful, and when his flyboy says something back in Swedish, Sasha could care less what it means.

 

* * *

 

Flying in the rain like that is crazy, crazy.

 

* * *

 

The base is paradise. The mess is full of familiar faces, and when Sasha walks through the aisle to sit down with the Russians, the Swedes nod hello. 

Sasha reaches out and brushes his fingers over the curve of Goldenrod’s helmet as he passes. It’s room temperature, just warm scuffed plastic, and it’s shocking to think that there’s nothing but that fragile shell between Goldenrod’s skull and the war, between him and what comes after Sasha on a regular basis. Goldenrod has a helmet and a flight suit and sixteen thousand kilos of metal, fuel, and avionics between him and the earth, and you’d have to be crazy to trust your life in that.

Sasha has his own gun and his flak jacket and helmet, which doesn’t seem like much, no. He has his shitty, jacked-up truck, yes. He has that, and on top of it all he has Goldenrod between him and destruction, and when he thinks about it that way, it’s like having the sun between him and the night.

 

* * *

 

The springtime comes while the war continues. It will continue until men have made another decision; it will drag on until somebody says stop, and that somebody certainly isn’t Sasha fucking Ovechkin, sleeping in a tent on the baked-dry dirt of a German air force base.

 

* * *

 

The Germans play soccer, pounding up the dust beside the tarmac. There are no fields, no lines and no goalposts; there’s only two balls on the whole damn base and they’re both flat half the time, but German ingenuity, duct tape, and boredom will get you almost anywhere. 

The Russians play basketball, because Sasha found a perfectly-sized ring of metal on their last mission and tossed it in the back of the truck to bring back. It hooks up nicely to the side of the smaller tanks, once Sasha and Semin find the right clamp. 

They play on dirt, in the hot dead-grass flat spaces of the training yard, a chain-link fence away from tarmac’s blacktop. The planes sit like butterflies caught as chrysalides, waiting to burst free and tear up the sky.

The Swedes play ball hockey on the tarmac under their jets, like they own every centimeter of it. They yell and check each other into the chain link like the Germans laid down the asphalt just for them.

 

* * *

 

Sasha talks a lot of shit in Russian; Russians talk lot of shit. Dima decks him onto his ass on the basketball court and Sasha curses him and his whole family, filth rolling off his tongue like water.

“Ah, you don’t mean it,” Dima says in Russian, helping him up. 

It’s 3-on-3 but they’ve attracted a passel of Germans, and, as Sasha realizes when Kuzya slams the ball into the side of the tank so hard it flies backwards into the crowd, three of the Swedes.

Sasha jogs to fetch it. The brunette has it; they’ve already started a game of keep-away. Goldenrod gets it, then he loses it, then the dark-haired one is shouldering him out of the way to have a go.

“Hey, hey,” Sasha says in English. “We using that.” They settle. The brunette tosses him the ball with an easy smile.

“Sasha,” Zhenya calls. “Hurry the fuck up,” he says in Russian. “It’s hot out here, asshole, and I didn’t show up to stand around and roast.”

It _is_ hot: the wet, angry winter has fully given way to a stifling spring. The dust bakes dry as their sweat drips down; the grass is dying blade by blade, though it only just started to grow.

“You play?” Sasha asks the brunette.

“Eh, not so well,” he says, supremely unconcerned. “I’m Henrik,” he offers, and then he offers his hand, and then Zhenya yells, “Sasha, for _fuck’s_ sake!”

“Sasha,” Sasha says, gesturing to himself, and goes to beat Zhenya down like he deserves.

 

* * *

 

Most of the Germans call Sasha _Alex_ , or _Ovechkin_. It’s written on his shirt in Cyrillic and on his ID in English lettering, and the Germans don’t like to waste time when they can avoid it. 

“Sasha,” Goldenrod says tersely when Sasha drums his fingers over the plastic of his helmet in the mess.

“Hm?” Sasha says. At the Russian table, Dima looks up and furrows his brow.

“Get your own,” Goldenrod says, laying his hand on top of his helmet.

Sasha leans over and draws his finger around the rim of the helmet, the lip where it would touch Goldenrod’s neck. The padding is worn down with use, gray where it should be white.

 _I have my own right here_ , he thinks.

“Maybe I want to try fly sometime,” he says instead.

“You think you can handle my jet, soldat,” Goldenrod smirks at him, “you be my guest.”

 

* * *

 

“What the hell was that?” Dima asks when Sasha sits down next to him.

“Nothing,” Sasha tells him. He lost that fucking round, that’s for certain. Next time.

Dima reaches out and spears a piece of sausage off Sasha’s plate.

“I’m just being friendly with our multinational corps,” Sasha says, smacking Dima’s hand.

Next time.

 

* * *

 

The Swedes are loud, louder than Sasha would have guessed, a chatty bunch of maniacs as they assign positions for ball hockey. 

The short dark-haired one is a forward, which everyone accepts without much effort; with 3-on-3, goalie is not a necessary position, Sasha gathers, and Goldenrod is giving Henrik some kind of evil eye at the prospect of being assigned to defense.

Goldenrod’s name is Nick, or Nicky, Sasha learns, because they’re loud and they’re demanding and Nicky isn’t passing the ball the way Erik wants. He’s extracted himself from minding the net but he’s apparently not putting up the points they need. It devolves quickly.

“Dima,” Sasha shouts, and Dima looks up from the engine and wipes his hands on the fronts of his trousers. Sasha jerks his head toward the fence.

“Ja, hi,” Henrik says when Sasha rattles the chain link. “What?”

“You want defender?” Sasha asks.

Henrik smiles.

“It’s gonna cost you,” Sasha warns him, because no fucking way is Dima getting to play without him.

 

* * *

 

Dima goes to Henrik’s team and Erik moves to defender and Sasha is on a line with Goldenrod against Henrik the first and  _another_ Henrik.

“We got more than two names in Russia,” Sasha teases in English. Dima snorts.

“Yeah, you tell them hi to Sasha Semin tonight,” and Sasha elbows him in the side.

Goldenrod plays fucking _hard_. He doesn’t look at the ball when he’s got it; he barely looks at Sasha when Sasha yells for it from across the tarmac, but he gets it to him all the same.

Goldenrod plays like it’s a real game, like winning is fucking important, and Sasha likes it.

He likes it a lot.

 

* * *

 

Goldenrod grabs Sasha’s wrist before Sasha can reach his helmet in the mess, snatches Sasha’s hand out of the air and holds it there.

“I just come to say hi,” Sasha says placatingly. “Nicky.”

“Hi,” Goldenrod says. “Don’t touch.”

Sasha wheels around and drops his tray on the table on the other side of Goldenrod’s helmet. Erik scoots over and smiles at him.

“Not going to touch, just look,” Sasha promises. Goldenrod glares at him. “Blyat, Nicky, don’t be so —” fuck, _possessive,_ but what is that in fucking English?

Erik says something in rapid-fire Swedish, and Goldenrod flushes a very perturbed-looking pink.

Sasha talks to Erik in their mutually shitty English for the rest of the meal while Goldenrod takes up all the space on his left, his presence expanding to fill every centimeter between them. He’s very loud in his silence.

“You see? I’m good,” Sasha says when he’s done. Goldenrod gives him a look of complete disbelief.

“You good for something,” he says skeptically.

“I’m good for everything, flyboy,” Sasha says. “Except for stay alive, and I got you for that.”

On his right, Erik laughs, bright and cheerful, and Sasha winks at Goldenrod and scoops up his tray and makes his exit. 

He won that one. Maybe he’ll win next time, too.

 

* * *

 

He does not win next time. Goldenrod has a quick tongue and faster hands and when Goldenrod whacks him on the knuckles and makes a pun on _infantryman_ in fucking _English,_ Sasha admits total defeat and goes to eat with the Russians.

Next time, he thinks. Next time.

 

* * *

 

The ten men who started this are treading water. They are sinking. It trickles down through the troops, whispers of an ending.

It would take a miracle, Sasha thinks. It would take a hundred men all in agreement to change their direction now.

Miracles do happen.

He looks at the wild, bright flowers of Goldenrod’s curls as they fall over his neck in the mess, as they stick to his temples in the sun on the tarmac. Sasha grabs one and pulls on it on his way past their table, and Goldenrod curses in Swedish and swats at him like a cat.

The end of the war will send Sasha home, and the thought fills him with a tight, angry sensation.

 

* * *

 

Half the Russians are reassigned to Moscow. Sasha and Dima are not with them.

There are whispers of a new mission, of Russians being deployed from other bases. There is no truth in war; there is nothing to believe but the next missive, the next day’s plan.

“They can’t fucking send _us_ home, no,” Dima bitches as they clean the timing belts for the fifth time. It’s not clear if it’s _can’t_ or it’s _won’t_ , but it is what it is. They aren’t going home. Not yet, anyway.

 

* * *

 

“Hi, Nicky,” Sasha says. He sets his tray on the table, and Henrik the first looks up.

“Hi,” Goldenrod says. Henrik the first nods and goes back to talking to other Henrik.

They won’t send Dima and Sasha home, but they will send them out one more time before the end, one last bad idea before the decision is made and fire of the war dies away.

“So,” Sasha says.

“You got news?” Goldenrod asks. His eyes are intent, green like jade. His face is drawn and focused.

“We going out again,” Sasha says quietly. The papers were handed out this morning. Goldenrod’s breath whispers past his lips, and his eyes close for a moment.

“We’re going home,” he says finally, opening them again.

 _Fuck,_ Sasha thinks. _Fuck_. It runs on a loop. He is not up to thinking much else.

“Maybe we go after you do?” Goldenrod says, his voice filled with hope, with fear, and Sasha nods.

He doesn’t have to say anything else, because they don’t have control over the things that happen to them, only the things that they do, but he doesn’t fucking want to go out there alone. He doesn’t want to go out into the darkness without the radio to save him, out into the night without his deadly golden light to call.

 

* * *

 

Dima and Sasha are forced by tradition and rank to share a living space, but since half the Russians were called home, they have a lot more of it. Sasha commandeered a German tent that had been full of munitions and threw his bedroll and supplies on the floor and stretched out.

He and Dima are leaving in three days. It looms, questionable and threatening, in the distance. They are going out to find a pointless target, to flag a building that will never feel the wrath or the fury of Mother Russia, and then, if they survive, they will go home. This war is flickering out, and in the embers they are being sent out to risk their lives for nothing.

It was never so stark, he thinks, before he knew he would be alone. The Swedes are leaving tomorrow.

Goldenrod didn't get his wish. Dima and Sasha don’t talk about it; Dima might not be — Dima might not feel it in his stomach the same way, and he might not see the same things when he closes his eyes, but he’s as scared as Sasha is. 

They can make it back. They might make it back. Sasha isn’t all that good at staying alive by himself.

 

* * *

 

Sasha cleans his gun; he cleans it again. Their truck is ready and this war is fucking _over_ , will be over the fucking second the people in charge let it end, and if they — when they get back from this, they’ll be going home.

Moscow is a long way from Stockholm.

Sasha can hear voices in the night air outside his tent, Dima and someone else. The flap opens.

“He’s here,” Dima tells the visitor. Henrik the first looks in, his beard almost black in the darkness.

“Sorry,” Henrik says. “I thought you were still in the big tent, you know.”

“It okay,” Sasha says, standing.

Dima leaves as Henrik ducks into the tent. “Nice,” he says appraisingly, as if that’s going to make any difference tomorrow.

“Not as nice as jet,” Sasha says, trying for levity, “but we gonna make do.”

“Not as nice as jet, no,” Henrik says. He runs his hand over the table, idle in the lamplight, and then looks up.

Sasha raises an eyebrow.

“You here for goodbye?” Sasha offers.

“No,” Henrik says flatly.

“Who knows, might not come back,” Sasha says, and Henrik’s eyes flash dark fire.

“You better come back, or we’ll have problem, you and me, ja?” he says, like he has a plan: like he knows the way to hell, if Sasha was thinking he might have a place to hide.

Sasha will — Sasha will have a lot of problems if he doesn’t come the fuck back, but the look Henrik is giving him, direct and expectant, is no kind of problem he was worried about before this moment.

“Yeah, well, gonna be back or gonna be gone,” Sasha says, frowning.

Henrik’s face doesn’t change.

“I know you all be sad without me,” Sasha adds, testing the water, “but it don’t matter too much when I’m not here.”

Henrik is older than Sasha; Henrik is older than Goldenrod by a mile, though Goldenrod’s babyface makes it hard to say for sure. Sasha feels like an idiot for dancing around it when Henrik looks him dead in the eye, no fucking patience at all.

“You want to say goodbye to him or no?” Henrik says finally. “He’s not sure you want.” His voice is even and open and dense with the kind of meaning that Sasha tries, so hard, not to pour into his own words. 

Sasha nods and follows him out.

 

* * *

 

The Swedes stay in the barracks like the German officers, which they are, of course. Goldenrod is a lieutenant. Sasha’s been in Russian special forces for a year longer than Goldenrod’s even been flying, but rank is rank, especially if you’re German.

Sasha gets to steal a tent because he’s a senior sergeant and because Dima would rather die than tell on him anyway, but you can’t steal a room with a door.

Henrik knocks on the door marked _BACKSTROM_ in dull brass lettering.

“Ja?” Goldenrod calls. 

Henrik nods at Sasha when the door opens, and Goldenrod stops with his mouth half-open, his eyes on Sasha’s face.

He really never has looked more like a sunflower, or a crazy person. Sasha smiles.

“Hi, Nicky. I come in?” he asks. Goldenrod steps back; Henrik is already on the way down the hall.

 

* * *

 

The barracks rooms have doors, but they’re still minuscule, barely a cot and a table. Goldenrod’s flight jacket is draped over the back of his chair, the three yellow crowns that call him home sitting innocently over the breast pocket. He’s in his dark blue fatigue trousers and a white T-shirt and his hair is so blond in the lamplight it nearly matches his insignia.

Sasha finally has a moment to look at him when he turns away from the door to let Sasha in: he has a moment to see him without anyone else watching, and this is, this is so — 

Goldenrod is only a boy when he turns around, without his flight suit, without his mess tray or his hockey stick or his team around him. He is younger than Sasha. His mouth is a soft pink in the muted yellow of the shitty German barracks bulbs and his eyes are the pale green of river water and if Sasha does not die without him he will die of missing him.

This is so much worse than Sasha thought it would be.

“We gonna leave first thing,” Goldenrod says. They are close together, necessarily close; they're standing face to face between the table and the cot, and Sasha thinks about how _good_ Goldenrod is, how proud and untouchable he is when he teases Sasha over the radio. How far away he will be.

“I know,” Sasha says. “Just come to say goodbye.” He takes Goldenrod’s hand and squeezes it, holds it up between them as if that’s enough, like a hug, like a promise, and God, he would promise anything just to see him again.

There is no reason anyone would ever assign Sasha, a fucking senior sergeant in the Red Army special forces, to any Swedish base, but he’s going to fucking _try,_ even if it’s impossible.

"So," Sasha says. "Goodbye."

“Goodbye, Sasha,” Goldenrod says. His eyes are everywhere. He’s not proud now, and he won’t let Sasha’s hand go, and just as Sasha opens his mouth to say something foolish, Goldenrod steps forward and kisses him.

It’s soft, so soft, tentative and rushed. Goldenrod’s right hand comes up to Sasha’s cheek when Sasha takes a startled breath.

He kisses Sasha again. 

Sasha has never kissed a man before, because in Russia you have to be crazy to do that; you have to be insane. He’s kissed women, because that makes fucking sense and because he won’t be court-martialed for it. Men are comrades, not lovers, and to do that with a man would be crazy, crazy.

Men, it’s madness even to think about, but think he has. 

He has, fuck, has he: he’s thought of this and _more_ than this and it’s kept him awake at night, kept him sweating in his sleeping bag in the cool German spring, and none of it held a fucking candle to the real thing.

Goldenrod’s lips part when Sasha kisses him back; his mouth isn’t so soft now. He’s sinking his fingers into Sasha’s hair and kissing him faster, greedy and focused. He pushes his tongue into Sasha’s mouth and groans, and Sasha drops their clasped hands to get ahold of Goldenrod’s curls, if only to have something to hang on to.

Sasha has no idea where they’ll stop if this is where they’re starting. Goldenrod has both his hands in Sasha’s hair and their chests pressed together and Sasha is rapidly getting hard, rapidly losing fucking track of anything but the wild, desperate warmth of Goldenrod’s mouth.

They stumble backward and Sasha sits down heavily on the bed with Goldenrod above him and driving him distraction, driving him fucking nuts with his mouth while his hands push under Sasha’s jacket and under his shirt. His fingertips feel like fire, fuck, incendiary and fucking everywhere _,_ running over Sasha’s chest and rubbing quick circles around Sasha’s nipples, torture, fucking _torture_.

Sasha is panting into Goldenrod’s mouth and he’s achingly hard in his fatigues and he thinks nothing is ever going to catch him and destroy him like this again; he’s going to be ruined for the rest of his fucking life, just from this.

Goldenrod rains kisses down Sasha’s neck and then drops to his knees between Sasha’s legs.

“Oh,” Sasha says, incredibly stupidly. His brain is sludge. He is a — Goldenrod licks his lips, and Sasha bites his tongue and crushes his eyes closed, oh, _fuck_.

He’s only ever had a woman do this to him once, and now, with Goldenrod on his knees, eyes wide and hungry, Sasha thinks he won’t hold on long enough to even start.

He lasts until Goldenrod gets Sasha’s fatigues open and his mouth on Sasha’s cock and then Sasha shoves the meat of his hand into his mouth and loses his fucking mind.

Oh, God, it’s better than — it’s so fucking good, he’s so _good_ , better than anything Sasha has ever felt, better than his hand or anything Sasha’s ever tried with a girlfriend in Moscow. Sasha can’t look at him without coming, can’t even _think_ of the slick red of his mouth around Sasha’s dick.

He pulls back and then slides down until Sasha’s cock is so deep, so — _fuck_ , Sasha can feel the soft give of his throat when he sucks and it’s so fucking good Sasha can’t believe it’s real, so good Sasha can’t —

Goldenrod chokes slightly when Sasha starts to come and he _knows_ that’s not allowed, not fine but he can’t fucking stop, can’t do much more than bite his fist and come until his eyes water.

“Sorry,” Sasha rasps when he can breathe again. “Sorry.”

Goldenrod has his own flies open and his hand in his boxers. Sasha sits up far enough to see the dark, flushed red of the head of his cock, to see the way his fist twists as he fucks into his hand. Oh, shit. Goldenrod shudders and moves faster, and Sasha stares, awed, as he presses his face into Sasha’s thigh and comes with a whimper.

He’s still breathing hard when Sasha leans down to kiss him; it’s madness, but he can’t stop himself. Goldenrod’s mouth tastes like _him_ , and it’s nearly enough to get him hard again.

“Where you going to be?” Sasha asks after Goldenrod wipes his hand on the bedsheet and gets his dick back in his pants.

Goldenrod looks up, startled. Sasha finishes with his buttons and pulls Goldenrod up to sit beside him.

“Stockholm?” Sasha suggests after a second. “Or somewhere else? You go home?”

“Home, maybe,” Goldenrod says eventually. “After some time, I think.”

“Okay,” Sasha says. Goldenrod’s mouth is so red, dark like a cherry, more tempting than anything Sasha has ever seen.

His sunbeam brows cant together as he looks Sasha over.

“Sasha, you don’t —” he starts.

“Gonna miss you,” Sasha interrupts, before Goldenrod can say something foolish himself.

 

* * *

 

Sasha makes it back to his tent after a long, long goodbye against the door of Goldenrod's room, after his lips are tingling and raw. He has a string of bruises down the side of his throat and one of Goldenrod’s stray hairs caught on the button of his jacket and memories to last him until he is an old, old man.

No; until next time. Next time.

 

* * *

 

The German jets have strings of numbers stenciled along their sides, their complex code of identification that only their pilots really understand. They have their call signs painted on them too, below the numbers and in whatever color their pilot could find at the time.

The Swedish jets have their call signs stenciled on them in official white block lettering, and it only takes Selti 16 two seconds to clear the runway and turn into a speck in the sky.

 

* * *

 

The curving black spine of the German hilltops is blacker now; the sun shines weakly during the endless days. Sasha and Dima dig in at night and hope for a radio call to home, hope for a way this could end without tragedy. This is a farce, a joke, a dangerous and terrible comedy, and Sasha has a growing fear that they have been forgotten out on the hillside, that the war will end without them ever even hearing word.

They are fighting for nothing, trying to get coordinates on a town that will never be bombed or overrun, trying to count the number of people who live there, who will go on living when this war is finally done.

War is a tragedy no matter who dies, but this is first time Sasha has felt truly alone.

The flowers are blooming in the valleys, blue and purple and red against the remaining green grass. They wilt in the heat, not proud enough to show Sasha their faces. He picks them mindlessly and pulls them apart. The sun shines weakly, as though it knows what it has to live up to.

 

* * *

 

The call comes, whispered like a confession, like a lie. They are told to come home, and they do.

 

* * *

 

Dima gets a medal for not dying; Sasha gets a promotion. Dima musters out as quickly as the paperwork can get processed, because he isn’t crazy — he has a wife at home, and he probably wants to see her. He has a job lined up at the aeronautics factory in Moscow and now he gets to do it, because he knows better than to sign up for another four years. There will always be another war, and one day you never do come home; Sasha knows that Dima will take his fucking chances where he can get them.

Sasha gets a promotion, because he _is_ insane, and because once he finishes the mandatory twelve-week training, he can put in for consideration of a transfer to an Ally base, to improve international relations.

“You want to do what?” Sasha Semin asks, blinking. “You — you think you’re going to be a _diplomat?”_

“I’m charming,” Sasha tells him.

“Just don’t start another fucking war,” Sasha Semin says. He didn’t get a promotion or a medal, but he didn’t quit, either. “I’m still tired from the last one.”

 

* * *

Sasha makes it to the joint Finnish-Russian Army base first, where there are Norwegian and Dutch pilots, but no Swedes. The Norwegians ignore him, and the Finns and Dutch are perfectly polite, perfectly good, but no match, no substitute at all.

 

* * *

 

He makes an unfortunate detour to Romania which wastes a full four months, and then he gets sent to Italy of all places. To say he is displeased is an understatement. He meets a great many representatives of the Italian Air Force and none of them are crazy: they’re all disappointingly sane, in fact, and boringly intent on keeping their feet on the ground and their planes out of the sky. He has been thrown out of at least seven offices by the third week, not in fury, but definitely in infuriation.

Sasha is crazy and getting crazier; the letters he gets from Dima only confirm it. Sasha is a madman, probably, and it’s getting kind of old, being the only crazy one.

“You’re so angry all the time,” says the only Italian he ever talks to anymore. They’re an obnoxious bunch, so reasonable and settled, and their English is mostly incomprehensible. Sasha’s English is much improved by his time abroad, but he still reviles it; there are only so many accents he’s willing to learn how to understand, and at this point he’s running out of patience.

“I’m stuck in your swamp country,” Sasha retorts, putting his feet up on the Italian’s desk. “Of course angry.”

The Italian snorts, but he doesn’t kick Sasha out of his office, not this time, which is a sort of progress.

 

* * *

 

The Italian is some kind of a colonel — in reality, Sasha knows the ranks of the Italian Air Force as well as he knows his own, but in the absence of ignorance he can at least feign indifference. The Italian has an office on the sixth floor of a building so old and opulent that it looks like a palace, and Sasha spends his free time there making suggestions about how he might be transferred to anywhere north of here short of Greenland.

The Italian has been to war three times, and he sounds as tired of it as Sasha Semin, only older; he sounds like he’s gone out and come back too many times to think there’s much nobility left in the quest. Sasha is restless because Sasha is moving towards something, if slowly and extremely fucking circuitously. The Italian is, near as Sasha can tell, done moving entirely.

“No northbound transfers opening up this week,” the Italian tells him, just like every week, and they pass the time playing darts and pretending not to understand each other’s motivations.

 

* * *

 

The Italian understands Sasha’s motivations; he understands them too well, Sasha discovers three months into his tour of excruciating sensibility when the Italian pushes Sasha’s feet off his desk, throws a folder into Sasha’s lap, and tells him that he’s requested that Sweden consider a diplomatic contingent to Southern Europe, and that he could use some advice on which officers to invite for the initial visit.

 

* * *

 

The folder is a list of names. There are no photos.

“How would I know who to ask come here?” Sasha says, sitting up. His heart is pounding. What the fuck is the spelling of Nicky’s full name? Can he put in a selection form with a nickname?

“Didn’t you meet some of the Swedish jet pilots, in Germany?” the Italian asks, cool as a summer breeze, smoother than cream, and Sasha takes a breath and opens the folder and prays there’s only one flyboy officer named Nick Backstrom who’s wearing the Tre Kronor.

There are two, one named Niklas and one named Nicklas. There are fourteen named Henrik, and nine Eriks.

_Fuck_ , Sasha thinks, for what feels like the thousandth time. _Fuck_.

It was crazy to think this would work.

When he looks up, the Italian is smiling.

“We could always ask Henrik to pick his own team,” the Italian says, like it’s a fix for what’s eating Sasha alive, and who the fuck knows: maybe it is.

“Which Henrik?” Sasha says automatically.

“He said he knew you,” the Italian says, slightly perplexed, and Sasha rolls his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says. “Which Henrik?”

 

* * *

 

It’s the other Henrik, it turns out, but he knows Henrik the first and more importantly they all know Goldenrod: they all know Nicky, who has apparently been promoted to captain and given a training position where he terrifies junior pilots into quitting or going as nuts as he is.

“Get that expression off your face,” the Italian tells Sasha when he tells him about Nicky’s new job. “You look like a fool.”

 

* * *

 

They still play darts; nothing moves that quickly. There are four days left until the Swedes arrive, and Sasha spends his days trying hopelessly to be productive and his nights trying helplessly to sleep.

“I don't think I’ve ever met him,” the Italian says, nailing the bull’s-eye, and Sasha pauses.

“Have you met lot of Swedish flyboys?” Sasha asks, carefully avoiding ‘him’.

He forgets, sometimes, that the Italian wasn’t always here, wasn’t always behind a desk with a folder of notes. 

He had his hands on a gun, once; he had his hands on the throttle of an Italian fighter plane back when they were all flimsy canvas and steel death traps, back when they fell right out of the sky if you looked at them hard enough, and Sasha forgets how completely fucking insane you have to be to do that.

“I’ve met a few,” the Italian says. “Enough to know they’ll fly through anything.” Sasha throws his dart and barely hits the third ring.

“Shit,” Sasha says.

“I’m excited to meet him,” the Italian says, flashing his white, sensible teeth at Sasha, and Sasha suddenly feels the full force of his deception, the full weight of what kind of an absolute lunatic he’s actually talking to. “I’d like to see the man who puts you on edge.”

 

* * *

 

No one told Goldenrod Sasha was here.

Sasha watches the beautiful wash of shock spill pale and stunned across Goldenrod’s face, sees it rise in his glass-green eyes like a tidal wave, and he greatly raises his estimation of both Henriks’ sense of humor.

“Hello, ryss,” Henrik the first says, blowing past Sasha with other Henrik as they come off the tarmac in their dress blues, looking like something out of a recruitment poster, and then other Henrik shakes the Italian’s hand they’re all talking about old times, talking about something that isn’t —

“Hi, Nicky,” Sasha says. It feels small in all this space, in the vast emptiness of peacetime.

“Hello,” Goldenrod manages finally; he is finally, finally here, and it is so much better than he thought it would be.

He’s still Selti 16, still bright-eyed and too smart for Sasha, too smart by half. Even flummoxed and open-mouthed, Sasha can see him lining up the pieces, his eyes flickering between Sasha and the Henriks, and Sasha should probably stop him before he starts plotting revenge.

You would think, maybe, that Sasha would have thought of what to say, with all this time to plan. You would think that he might have come up with something clever, something —

“I stay alive,” Sasha says, struck stupid by the wild length of Goldenrod’s curls, rendered an imbecile by the curve of his mouth, by the year and then some that has passed, three hundred and eighty-one days reflected in the ocean of Goldenrod’s eyes. 

He’s footsteps from Sasha, not four hundred feet above him, not a thousand miles away, and Sasha can’t kiss him on the tarmac but he can put his arms around him and hold on tight enough to keep his hands from shaking.

“Yes,” Goldenrod says into Sasha’s shoulder. “Yes.”

 

* * *

Sasha has a single room in the international barracks, which is a repurposed forty-year-old apartment building that only has windows in the north-facing rooms. Sasha had spent half his first paycheck in bribes to get transferred across the hallway. 

It starts to rain just as Sasha gets back to his room. The Swedes had been pulled away to fill out forms and meet men of a rank even Sasha couldn’t push around; the Italian had shot Sasha a look that almost resembled apology, as if Sasha was apt to hijack the motor-pool car with them in it and drive it off base to some safe house.

He could; he would. They’re coming back, is all, so he doesn’t have to.

It’s raining like that night trapped with Dima in the grain silo, raining like God’s given up on them all and is trying to wash the earth clean again. It’s raining hard enough to wash a boat ashore, hard enough to bring a plane down.

Goldenrod opens the door without knocking, and Sasha drops his book in surprise.

“Nicky,” he starts, standing. Goldenrod stops in the act of closing the door behind himself. His lips make it partway to a word and then fade. His brow creases.

“Do you,” he says. He swallows. “Am I not —”

Sasha pushes the door shut and pushes Goldenrod up against it, because he owes him for a goodbye a long time ago. He owes him; he has owed him this for months.

He owes him a next time, he thinks, and a next time, and a next time, and he intends to pay in full.

 

* * *

 

“So you became a diplomat?” Goldenrod says from the bed beside Sasha. His voice is sweet and wicked, too smart for Sasha by half, by ten times.

“Don’t worry,” Sasha says. “Sasha Semin already yell at me. Not going to start new war any time soon.”

“I don’t think I mind so much,” Goldenrod says, reaching for Sasha’s hand. “As long as you don’t start it without me.”


End file.
